Il Mulino - Rivisteweb
Vı́ctor Pérez-Dı́az
Vulnerable Gods and Mutual Learning between
Religion and Secularism
(doi: 10.2383/73712)
Sociologica (ISSN 1971-8853)
Fascicolo 1, gennaio-aprile 2013
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Symposium / Ritual and Religion in Human Evolution
Vulnerable Gods and Mutual
Learning between Religion
and Secularism
by Víctor Pérez-Díaz
10.2383/73712
1.
A Quasi-Religious Secularism: the Vulnerable Gods of Advanced
Modernity
1.1. A Quasi-Religious Secularism
In the final remarks of his study on Religion and Human Evolution, Robert Bellah [2011, 602 ff.] declares his practical intent to favor a dialogue among religions,
each understood on its own terms, a universe of multiple traditions and a world civil
society with which to embrace them all. Here I consider, in a somewhat analogous
spirit, the debate between religion and (modern) secularism, and I explore the possibility of mutual learning between them.
Secularism and secularization correspond to a crucial experience of a limited
segment of the Western elites of the last one to two hundred years. Far from suggesting a direction of a world historical process, it has been a rather confined affair, contingent on peculiar and ephemeral conditions. All the same, it is full of significance
for those most committed to it, even though it is usually experienced by many less in
a mood of willful assertion than one that takes them from one day to the next. But
there may be a twist here. Because, although there is every indication that the secularist ambition to provide direction has so far failed, it has left traces of potentially
troubling but equally potentially interesting and useful consequences.
Sociologica, 1/2013 - Copyright © 2013 by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna.
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Pérez-Díaz, Vulnerable Gods and Mutual Learning between Religion and Secularism
One of the indications that secularism is failing to replace or supersede religion
(in any one of the dimensions of belief, of belonging/institutions, of its role in social
imagery, or of the public space [Taylor 2007]) is due to the fact that it is, quite often,
already a form of religious experience itself. Advanced modern societies are frequently understood as godlike by their secularistic elites, even though this understanding
seeks to embrace the whole of the social imagery of society and, therefore, comes
under the guise of the self-understanding of modern society. Such a society strives to
exhibit the characteristics of a (quasi-)divine world, self-sufficient, self-complacent,
all-powerful, omniscient, surrounded by an aura of sacredness, demanding the full
commitment and dedication of its members. At the same time, there is something inherently fragile and vulnerable about this divine world and the divine/heroic figures
that populate it. It seems as if they are on the verge of chaos, running up against all
sorts of limits in the control (and understanding) of their environment, in the internal
dynamics that pull and push society in various directions, not to mention the ordinary
individual units within it, who are largely lost at sea.
There are different versions of secularism qua religion. If (as Marx [1951] said)
history sometimes repeats itself first as tragedy and then as comedy, then a tragic version of religious secularism was created by the variants of gnostic religions of several
political movements of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries with well-known and
world-wide catastrophic consequences [Voegelin 2000; Jonas 2001], whereas today,
by contrast, we find another more prosaic and restrained version of it. Daniel Bell
has pointed to the peculiar process of re-enchantment of the world that has been
taking place of late in our advanced societies, which he refers to as the return of the
sacred [Bell 1980, 324 ff.]. However, this return of the sacred should refer not only
to the revival of genuine religions but also to the spread of this sort of secularism as
a new simulacrum of religion. In fact, the West’s interpretation of itself in the role of
an elusive god lies at the heart of a good deal of its culture and politics. It may even
cloud the West’s views on the nature of some of its current challenges, including, for
instance, on matters of war and peace. Let us take as an example one of the several
war situations that the West faces today. Quite often, we do not choose our enemies,
our enemies choose us. Right now, the West has been singled out to be defeated,
eagerly destroyed by certain Islamic fundamentalists. Why have so many people in
the West been so slow to recognize this simple fact and been so ready to forget about
it almost as soon as the threat seems to recede? It is hard to believe that this is just
a matter of bonhomie – of a peaceful disposition. Maybe the main reason lies in a
distorted interpretation of their own history that leads many Westerners to entertain
grandiose views that mix a justifiable self-esteem with hubris. When leaning on the
side of hubris, as it often does, the West sees itself “on top of the world:” of a world
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that is gradually being re-made in its own image. In other words, it sees itself as godlike. This suggests to us one of the reasons for the West’s reluctance to accept the fact
that it is facing deadly enemies: because, who in their right mind would be willing
to have God as their enemy?
It’s true that this godlike self-image is compatible with a good deal of self-criticism, but there is a caveat. The West works out its self-congratulatory act by splitting into two halves, each intent on criticizing the other under the guise of the religious-minded versus secularists, or the left versus the right, etc. Yet underlying their
mutual critiques lies a mechanism of mimetic rivalry. Each side comes out with its
own formula for the West to perform its quasi-divine role, to be the leading character in the drama of history and, last but not least, to be responsible for good order
and prosperity in the world, much as the absolute monarchs of the ‘good old days’
claimed to be responsible for their subjects’ well-being.
1.2. A Repertoire of Discourses of Justification
Western cultural elites have provided a complicated repertoire of creeds and
moral intimations to back their self-understanding of the West. On the scientific
side, the main thrust from the natural sciences has been directed at giving support
to Western hubris. It has been strongly suggested that the growth of knowledge has
been and will be of quasi-divine proportions and that, having eaten from the tree
of science, our earthly home will become, in time, a sort of earthly paradise. The
facts that increasing knowledge also means increasing awareness of our ever greater
ignorance, and that the knowledge thus acquired remains largely conjectural, in other words, the limits of science (which true scientists are well aware of), are largely
overlooked in the public mind. The strong implication is, too, that science promises
deliverance from much of our human suffering, and its promise is treated as grounds
for an entitlement to be claimed by present and future generations. This has been
complemented by the combined effects of economics and other social sciences, and
education, all pretending predictive and formative capacities that they lack. However, they raise expectations that a society organized in a scientific manner would be
more successful, and able to handle all sorts of problems more promptly and efficiently.
On the humanities side (philosophy, history and the arts), the story has been
more confused. The West attempted to blend its classical and Christian legacies, with
limited success. This was followed by an uneasy combination of remnants of the old
beliefs with a kind of new polytheism. A moral and legal humanism that was more or
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less attuned to an appeal to civic and liberal virtues and tended to reinforce a long
tradition of common sense and moral sense among large segments of society [Wilson
1997], lived in a state of uneasy coexistence with the various claims of self-centered
individualism, with all sorts of communal idols (nation, race, class, and the like), and
with the cults of sheer power, wealth and fame.
Now, as a result of their confusion and a series of painful disappointments,
many people make do with a form of situational ethics, according to which different
rules are applied to different circumstances. This suggests a return to Kierkegaard’s
aesthetic stages [Kierkegaard 1940] or to Bells’ aestheticism [Bell 1980, 338] in which
there is a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ to every moral alternative. These may be both explored
and enjoyed by turns according to circumstances, for the sake of enriching our experience, engaging in an experiment in living, or fostering our sentimental education.
Furthermore, we bracket the fundamental questions about the meaning of the world
off, and decide to keep on going while defining the human condition as both aimless
and without foundation.
Paradoxically, such cultural relativism may indirectly reinforce the West’s selfunderstanding of itself as godlike through two converging paths. Firstly, cultural relativism reinforces the understanding that we are the ultimate source for the beliefs
we hold. We create our world of meanings, and lastly the world tout court, as we do
not adhere (nor give our assent) to a world which is already there, and may have been
given to us by means of faith – a grace bestowed upon us by a God we cannot handle
at will, by tradition, or both.
Second, cultural relativism has affinities with a style of politics that conveys a
message of politicians’ divine lightheartedness. Quite often, political leaders seem to
be surrounded, protected and constrained by the media, their own parties and civil
servants, while trying to be responsive to the demands and expectations of a volatile
environment. In other words, while they attempt to be true to their name and lead,
most of the time they are no more than survivors and pragmatic manipulators who
look for openings in a far too complex and rather opaque world. When they explain
to or exhort their public, they resort to the cultural repertoire of their times, and pick
up the cultural topoi to be applied ad hoc to the different scenes of the commedia
dell’arte of politics, playing them mostly on a melodramatic key. They are, by turns,
Christians, humanists, nationalists, market-oriented, social-minded, family men or
women, law-and-order types or empathetic with all kinds of lost souls. They are, say,
“inclusive,” and “on the move.” Still, the key to their success is to keep most people
on board and persuade them to go along with the situation.
The implicit background assumptions for this pattern of behavior are a focus
on today’s events, short memories, and an easy (and, hopefully, contagious) optimism
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regarding the future, in which there will either be a solution to every problem or we
shall be able to live with problems for which there is no solution. Unfortunately, it
must be obvious that only people touched by divine grace can live this way.
Lightheartedness, however, requires fair weather. Faced with rougher, tougher
times such as the current ones, the West has to resort to magic tricks, such as finding
refuge in repeating the mantra that the West is home to liberal democracy, markets,
the rule of law, pluralism and tolerance. This is, no doubt, a healthy combination
of institutions and values, which may go by the name of an open society, a civil society (in the broad sense of the term [Pérez-Díaz 2011]), a free society or an order
of liberty. However, we find that the tendency of many in the West is to imagine
that just by naming things, these things come into being. While the Word of God
may have created the world out of nothing, the words of mankind are not that powerful.
1.3. An Elusive Sense of Limits
The problem is that, although this normative model describes what the West
is and what, to a large extent, it tries to be, it remains, at best, only half the story.
In reality, Western societies have to come to terms with the fact that they are a mix
of open, civil or free societies and of something else. The normative model of an
open society can be partially realized under certain conditions as the outcome of
dramatic confrontations between human agents: an outcome that depends crucially
on how these agents interpret the situations they face. However, the normative model
of an open society is not the only operative model that human agents use in our
Western societies. Far from it. An order of freedom provides a framework of rules
and dispositions that people may choose to use in a purely instrumental spirit in order
to pursue their own goals, whether these are to the benefit of themselves or others,
with little thought for the common good. Thus, underlying the normative model of a
free society, there is a (different, yet related) normative model of a societas cupiditatis.
This model includes a wide variety of cupiditates such as the maximization of power,
wealth and status for oneself, one’s closest kin, and friends and comrades-in-arms.
Achieving these goals often involves the use of violence and fraud: the key vices of
the innermost circles of Dante’s Inferno (as Bell [1980: xxiii] reminds us).
The tension between the normative order of a well-ordered free society and
the antinomian model of freedom to do whatever we may decide is good for each of
us as individuals is part of the game of the Western type of society on record. The
price to be paid for it should be the self-understanding of this society as a very human
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Pérez-Díaz, Vulnerable Gods and Mutual Learning between Religion and Secularism
(not godlike) and fragile construction, which may self-destruct. And self-destruct
it did: in the Twentieth century, the West spawned two civil wars, which became
world wars, and engendered two totalitarian regimes, which spread all over the world,
threatened liberty and had to be overcome by force. All this was at a time when
science, technology, formal schooling, economic growth and media communications
(should we say ‘advanced modernity?’) were flourishing.
Although it seems that the West has left such totalitarian nightmares behind,
it now faces new and sobering challenges as a result of the increasing complexity of
the world, bordering on endemic economic turmoil. Some authors place these within the context of large-scale changes that are pushing mankind beyond any natural
ecological carrying capacity (Bellah, for instance, claims that we may be in the midst
of a process leading to a ‘sixth extinction’ of animal species [Bellah 2011, 601 ff.]).
Whatever the tempo and scale we choose, the fact is that not only the West but all
mankind faces grave dangers compounded by fragile institutions and failing characters, for which there are no easy solutions. In a sense, the situation may remind us
of the one evoked by Neurath’s image of his ship, hard to rebuild while sailing the
high seas [Cartwright et al. 1996, 89 ff.].
Evidence of this failing character can be found just by looking at the most
powerful and apparently most successful representative of the West, the United States
of America, and observing its performance à propos of an incident of parcours such
as the Iraq war. An incidental war that has taken a few years of US attention (starting
in 2003) and a limited amount of its resources, it may serve as a symptom of the
US’ proclivity to get mired in a strategy befitting a godlike personality – a variety of
lighthearted divinity – in the face of challenges that should require a more careful
understanding of the situation.
Let us look at some of the tactical mistakes made by the US in the war of Iraq.
Although many of them may have been almost impossible to avoid in the heat of the
moment, we can take these mistakes as cues suggesting that what is at work here is
the behavior to be expected from people tempted to play God and overrate their
powers. This may help to explain, at least in part, the following list of missteps. 1)
The panache with which the mis-assessment of Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was originally made. 2) The carelessness of the diplomatic work carried out
‘from a distance’ at the time of establishing a coalition and persuading world public
opinion: the latter was implicitly treated as a chorus that would stick to the script and
keep to the sidelines. 3) The (possible) underestimation of danger that led to there
being fewer troops than necessary for the task of controlling the territory after the
invasion, as if the mere presence of soldiers armed with sophisticated ‘magic’ weapons,
and with ‘a halo of victory’ would be enough. 4) The rather euphoric expectation that
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the troops would be greeted as liberators, also an effect of their ‘divine presence’. 5)
The excessive trust placed in electronic intelligence ‘from a distance:’ almost literally
‘from heaven.’ 6) The almost spot decision to dismantle the Iraqi army, thoughtlessly discarding the comparative advantage of people with (merely) ‘local knowledge’
(that is, lacking the ‘necessary distance’), and of people with ‘down-to-earth, (merely)
human motivations,’ such as family survival and the need for an administrative job
and a monthly salary, and therefore, presumably, lacking ‘purity of intentions’ and
‘ideological (holy) clearances.’ And still counting. To its credit, however, we must
recognize that the US knows what its identity, its history and its borders are, and has
proved itself willing and able to apply the means for a robust foreign and defense
policy, whereas in the case of Europe all these elements are missing. This suggests
that Europe may be attempting to achieve a different variety of divinity, perhaps of
the Oriental kind: one that nobody should be afraid of, with ill-defined contours and
lacking a strong sense of agency. Alternatively, it may be seeking a divine presence
that hints at providing mankind with a genteel, unobtrusive parental or maternal care.
2.
Secularism and Religion: Learning Humility from Each Other through
Mutual Criticism
2.1. Religion and Coping with Reality
In any event, the whole “winding passage” of mankind (Bell’s reference to
Dante’s passage from hell to purgatory) will have to be traversed step by step.
This involves grave dangers and extraordinary risks that test the limits of human
control over the world, no matter the extent of our resources, as sheer luck as
well as human insanity or malignity will always play a part. Still, having journeyed
thus far, we can but hope that humans will take their next steps in a mood of
realism, resolution and humility. These virtues will be necessary for society and
its institutions to survive, and may require people to go back to Kierkegaard’s
[1940] ethical and religious stages: to secular civic virtue and to some form of religion.
Religions, or religious-like experiences, rest on the existential, ontological human condition of human beings trying to cope with reality while they search for cues
for enacting the proper set of habits and dispositions (virtues) with which to do so.
These practices come with a limited yet approximate cognitive assessment of what
is going on. They are accompanied by a tentative, usually practical or tacit knowledge, which may be instrumental in acquiring a set of heuristics and theories, which
are, in turn, subject to learning from experience. However, the lessons may be for-
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gotten just as the habits and dispositions may go astray, and both understandings
and misunderstandings, good deeds and misdeeds are bound to occur all the time
with no guarantee whatsoever of progress. Even so, learning may take place through
dialogue and mutual criticism (brotherly correction?) between the better versions of
religion and secularism. This is so because we can assume that the more we learn
from our common experience, the more we shall combine the act of learning from
others’ mistakes with that of learning from others who bring our own mistakes to our
attention (bringing in the outside view [Kahneman 2011, 245 ff.]). In other words,
learning from the mutual criticism of religious people and secularists, provided they
share some premises.
Religions’ contribution to people’s coping with reality comes with a cognitive
(symbolic) assessment of what true reality means. True reality would supposedly encompass both extraordinary and ordinary experiences. It would include such extraordinary experiences as death, as being part of a meaningful community extending
beyond personal life into the past and into the future, and as the search for plenitude.
This plenitude could be variously articulated as flourishing, love, peace, recognition
and/or intense feelings associated with the double dimension of humans qua rational, autonomous animals and qua dependent, vulnerable, caring animals [MacIntyre
1999]. And, of course, true reality would include the so-called paramount [Schutz
1967] though in fact often subordinate, experience of everyday life, ingrained in and
interconnected with the extraordinary experiences just mentioned.
Thus, religion consists not so much of a set of symbols [Geertz 1973] as, first and
foremost, a set of enacted symbols [Bellah 2011, 11 ff.], that is, of practices connected,
in a problematical way, with a set of verbal and non-verbal statements [Skinner 2002].
If we accept that the primordial feature of religion is practices, we can now focus on
a set of practices, or rather of habitual practices that, qua virtues, would form the
ethical core of some specific historical segment of human societies.
2.2. A Shared Ground: the Common Ethical Core of Different Narratives of
Axial Religions and Civil Society
What we call the axial religions and, in their wake, religions such as Christianity
and Islam, for instance, as well as sensible versions of modern secularism, all intimate
that we are bound together by bonds of mutual loyalty and respect; just as we are
bound to the preceding generation which bequeathed us their world, and to the succeeding one on which we shall bestow our world as their heritage. We could call the
feelings involved in these bonds by many names but if we keep to the Western tradi-
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tion, we will recur to the familiar Roman names of religio, pietas and subordination to
a being higher than ourselves [Barrow 1949, 22 ff.]. Or, as we move on to a language
of ultimate reliance on divine protection, and grace, to the Augustinian name of Love
of God. If we do so, we may discover that the return of the sacred is already amongst
the people of the West, not only in the form of a moralizing, redemptive and mystical
religion [Bell 1980, 348 ff.], but also in the form of a search for grounding both our
individual chances in life and our collective chances to continue living as members
of a meaningful moral community.
On the other hand, even though the one particular narrative of Western style
advanced modernity suggested by the tale of the vulnerable gods has hubristic and
delusional effects, there are other versions of a more sober and humble character.
Instead of merely opposing religions and secularisms, these set out to explore the ways
in which religions and secularisms could learn from each other, assuming that they
share, to a significant extent, a basic core of ethical, pragmatic premises.
Depending on the starting point of the inquirer, these premises will appear in
the context of different narratives, and rest on differently articulated ontological and
anthropological assumptions. For instance, from a Christian viewpoint, the belief in
the incarnation of God – of God assuming His human nature – makes no sense unless
this belief incorporates the insight that human nature as such is already dignified
enough to be able to incorporate the divine presence. We have to assume that there is
some common ground here, some analogy and affinity, between the Supreme Being
and mere human beings since humans are supposed to have been made in the image
of God. This is the case, even though human nature is subject, on the one hand, to
animal survival, concupiscent instincts, the temptation of evil, and death, and, on the
other hand, to a process of change through exposure to the experience of living and
evolution. Several pieces of the Christian narrative provide cues for articulating that
affinity, which are displayed in the narrative of a divine providence as well as in that
of a natural law which comes to light, somewhat belatedly, through ordinary human
common sense and moral sense.
A partially different narrative, whose ties to the religious tradition were originally quite strong but have gradually weakened over the course of time, is the narrative of civil society. Heir to the ancient polis or civitas as well as to the reform agenda
of Christianity in the early middle ages to make the civitas terrestris more akin to the
civitas dei, the project of civil society has become a multi-rooted historical experience
whose different social supporters have found common ground in a secular or semisecular language [Pérez-Díaz 2011]. In this narrative, civil society has a significant
and distinctive ethical core: an ethic of individual freedom combined with an ethic
of seeking a common good, together with the cultivation of the virtues of fairness,
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generosity, care, benevolence and so on. These virtues are supposed to improve the
chances of survival, and of coping with reality, of the society under consideration: in
the end, it is the reality of the whole of mankind plus the earth for which mankind
accepts at least partial and provisory responsibility.
If we consider that the ethical core of a (well-ordered) civil society overlaps
and is consistent with that of a (well-ordered) Christian society (or equally, a well-ordered Taoist or Confucian society), then it makes sense that, instead of secularists
and religious-minded people opposing one another regarding the development of a
common ethical core, we consider the possibility of learning to practice the basic,
shared virtues in complex ways that encourage a sort of reciprocal learning on the
part of both religions and secularisms.
I shall advance two relatively minor illustrations of what I am referring to. They
are minor, in that I am not attempting to provide evidence of the egregiously mistaken
acts of secularists or religious people: therefore I shall not dwell on the Holocaust,
the Gulag, the Holy Inquisition or the wars of religion. (The latter, by the way, were
messy affairs undertaken largely as a cover for the naked struggle for power of the
nation-states of the time [Cavanaugh 1999]). They are illustrations in that they refer
not so much to theoretical, dogmatic issues, per se, but rather to enacted symbolisms,
that is, to the practice of virtues.
Let us start with the possibility of religions learning from secularism by looking
to the Catholic Church to learn from the arguments and demands by some segments
of the ‘civil sphere’ for it to properly confront the (relative) spread of the phenomenon
of pedophile priests [Alexander 2006; 2013]. This means that the Church must learn
to fight such practices in a more thorough way by submitting the guilty party to the
application of criminal law; and in a more principled way by emphasizing the need to
protect the weakest parties, namely, the victims. Thus the Church would be reminded
of one of the most basic premises of its own teachings, as summarized by the symbol
of Jesus as the supreme victim, as agnus dei.
Vice versa: let us take a look at what secularism might learn from religion.
For instance, learning to tame its own inner violence and lack of civility, of the sort
demonstrated (and this is a relatively minor item in today’s Western imaginary) by
the propensity of some segments of that very ‘civil sphere’ to live in a state of chronic,
self-righteous indignation, while enacting the performative contradiction of preaching peace and displaying feelings of hatred. For example, after his encounter with the
German Greens, the Buddhist friend of Charles Taylor [2007, 698] was astonished to
observe their conspicuous lack of benevolence towards their adversaries. Of course,
we could expand upon this reference to include the recurrent outpouring of similar
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feelings of hatred and contempt in the rituals of the usual culture wars between the
right and the left everywhere.
2.3. Limits of Religions’ Moral Reform Agendas: Axial Religions’ Limited Fit
with the Historical Situation of the Day, and its Variants
Every religion has an ethical core that allows for a wide array of practical applications. Sometimes religion and the world fit fairly well together, with religion providing a discourse and ritual of justification of the world and its ways. More often,
pace Durkheim, religion does not fit with the world, or does so only in a limited way.
In the case of a partial fit, whereby religion meets the world halfway, so to speak, religion may not involve full rejection of the world but only a gesture towards its reform;
nor does it imply a call for the destruction of the world but for its rectification – for
social repairs. In this case, the basic human mood inspired by religion may be built
not on the expectation of an imminent apocalypse but rather on the idea of better
times to come, even though they may be postponed sine die; in the meantime, one just
follows one’s law, for instance, halakha, in the Jewish case the best one can, and waits
[Wieseltier 2010]. There is the risk, however, that, by waiting, one accommodates
oneself to the ways of the world.
As Bellah [2011] reminds us, we can distinguish three main variants of religion.
These are: a) tribal religions that correspond to human beings in rather simple settings, in order to help them to cope; b) archaic religions, in relatively more complex
settings which some simplifying power schemas (such as the one composed of emperors/kings together with a priestly class and a warrior class, on the back of peasants and servants) try to make more predictable (with considerable recourse to violence); and c) axial religions, in even more complex settings. It is the axial religions
that develop the ethical core of all religions. They appeal to judgement or reflexivity
and, even more importantly, they engage in a systematic cultivation of a set of moral
virtues. At the same time, they deal with the fact that humans show themselves only
mildly inclined to develop such virtues: that they are recalcitrant sinners, so to speak.
Thus, these religions are permanent witnesses not only to the resistance of external
reality but to an inner, deeply-rooted resistance on the part of humans to become
thoroughly moralized [Balthasar 2004, 64], a resistance that is felt both in the workings of human institutions and in humans’ dispositions.
The point is that axial religions help humans to cope with reality in the peculiar
way of helping them to question the world that they inherit and recreate day after day.
Far from letting this question stand on its own, they require people to engage, with all
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their body and soul, in doing something about it, and in being responsible for doing
so before others. At the same time, religious people are expected to live with the
consequences of the world’s resistance and their own inner resistance to such engagement. The result is an ongoing drama with multiple plots. The example of Christianity
shows that a religious tradition may admit of many different versions. There are variants wherein religion helps the development of the original ethical core by reinforcing
social solidarity (inclusion within a particular group) against a scapegoat (excluded
from the particular group) and/or an external enemy, and in so doing they justify and
encourage the use of violence. At the other extreme, there is the variant of all-encompassing, all-inclusive peaceful religion: for example, Jesus preaching the Sermon on
the Mount, love of all humans, including one’s enemies. And all shades in between.
The intermediate varieties leave the door open for experimentation with, and a
gradual evolution of, quite different moral sentiments. For instance, they may allow
a) some people to try the Grand Way or the Great Tao, or the Kingdom of Heaven
on earth [Merton 2004], while b) others stick to a strict application of a code of rules
that excludes others from the community of the chosen, and c) yet others may avoid
playing the game of those whom they consider dangerous moralizers, and make do
with a second best, or a lesser evil. They would have learnt from historical experience
that they may find a decent and sensible modus vivendi in this world by applying
a mild reform agenda to several circles of solidarity or inclusion. These circles may
include the group of one’s closest friends, family and loved ones to whom one offers
effective/effusive/unconditional love as well as the one that requires a more guarded
form of love, chastened by the experience of dealing with people with a strong libido
dominandi and/or libido servandi.
Some of these experiences may allow for, and evolve into, experiences of indifference or cruelty vis-à-vis strangers. These, in turn, may generate a contrary reaction
that gives rise to criticism of that kind of religious experience and, by contrast, to the
emergence of some sort of un-religious benevolent humanism. In a new twist, this
benevolent humanism may be of the kind Simone Weil [1966, 122 ff.] calls “implicit
love of God,” or “implicit Christianism,” as shown by love of one’s neighbor, love of
humans in general and love of the order and beauty of the world, from which actual
Christian church-goers could, in due time, learn... to become better Christians.
All the above leads us back, again, to how the experience of learning from the
debate between religions and secularisms could help us to manage today’s situation
in the best possible way. The situation can be characterized as either one of low risk
and huge opportunity – in a Candide-like view of the modern world as the best of all
possible worlds – on the basis of ever more science and understanding, self-control
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and control of external reality, freedom and democracy, prosperity and mutual respect, etc; or alternatively, one of huge opportunities but a very high risk of disaster.
Let us consider the latter possibility. Robert Bellah, for one, thinks that we have
a crisis of incoherence and are, in the words of Mark Strand [2011, xix ff.], “too
busy for living” (which I would interpret as ‘too busy for a good, meaningful life’)
while dealing, as we are, with the ongoing experiences of the risk of war, increasing
inequalities, etc. As mentioned above, he ponders the chances of an ecological disaster
that we may be in the midst of [ibidem 601 ff.]. These and other similar remarks
(though not necessarily catastrophic in character) find an echo in voices coming from
different quarters. Take, for instance, the general direction of Nassim Taleb’s recent
book Antifragile [Taleb 2013]. It amounts to a vehement yet persuasive argument for
learning to live with increasing incertitude and ever higher risks of chaos combined
with our very limited understanding of the situation that mostly comes into play after
the fact. The picture is basically one of elites who are chronically unreliable because
of their lack of wisdom (the inability of even the brightest and best to make a correct
cognitive assessment of what is going on) and their lack of virtue (beginning with
their hubris). The ongoing economic crisis of 2007/2013 would be just an indication
of what this is all about.
Far from being an invitation to despair, these are fair and wise warnings that
may be construed as indicating that the time is propitious for a genuine, benevolent
religion and a genuine, benevolent secularism to engage in a contest of mutual brotherly corrections (as Thomas Aquinas [2005, 195 ff.] would say). This should include
a learned debate in which there is an opportunity for the best arguments to be put
forward [MacIntyre 1988]. At the same time, I surmise that this is not just a matter
of dialectical debates but of rhetorical encounters [Milbank 2006] and also, mainly,
of pragmatic engagements in face to face communities and with regard to people
whom we feel personally and directly responsible for and committed to. These dialogues and shared experiences could take place between peaceful religious people
and benevolent secularists, hopefully aware of the risks posed by self-righteous and
dangerous moralizers on both sides.
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Pérez-Díaz, Vulnerable Gods and Mutual Learning between Religion and Secularism
Vulnerable Gods and Mutual Learning between Religion and Secularism
Abstract: The author explores the possibility that modern secularism and axial religions engage
in a process of mutual learning on the basis of ethical premises they may share, and argues that
the outcome of this process depends on the extent they share a sense of the intellectual and
moral limits (fallibility, failing character) of all agents involved. He also suggests that a particular
version of modern secularism, which corresponds to the social imagery of ‘vulnerable gods’,
exhibits in fact an elusive sense of such limits.
Keywords: Modernity, secularism, civil society, axial religion, Christianity.
Víctor Pérez-Díaz is president of Analistas Socio-Políticos (ASP), Research Center (Madrid). Member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Academia Europaea. Ph.D. Sociology, Harvard
University. He has been Professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid and Visiting
Professor at Harvard University, the MIT, the University of California, San Diego, the New York University
and the Institut des Sciences Politiques. Among other books, he is the author of The Return of Civil
Society [Harvard University Press, 1993], La lezione spagnola [Il Mulino, 2003] and Markets and Civil
Society [Berghahn 2009, editor].
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